The Hungarian Landscaper's Daughter
Poem
The Hungarian Landscaper's Daughter
Sitting on a slab
of concrete
in City Park,
a white,
Central European-sized
landscaping truck
in all its compact
rectangularity
passes,
unnoticed, really,
until my attention,
sketched less than drawn,
registers the young woman
driving the work vehicle,
mostly from the contrast:
beside her
an obvious veteran
maintainer of public parklands,
he and the truck
both having logged years
in their mutual pursuit.
The truck cut through
a path meant
for walking,
so too did the image
through my mind,
a memory not born,
though unknowingly conceived.
And so it would’ve stayed,
without continuity
of awareness
had not my direction,
intended one way,
split towards the other,
an impromptu change
for no reason
other than the sense
of some passing incomplete,
tailing me along.
Consciousness too has
its gears, and
suddenly I felt
its internal engine
bump into second,
then quickly third
and fourth,
when, walking further on,
I noticed
the passenger man
standing outside
the same white truck
now parked.
He was taking a photo;
at first I wondered,
“of what, of who?”
and then I realized,
after catching sight
of the young driver
now with hose
in her hand,
capably tending
a patch of green,
oblivious to
a beaming father
helping the day
grow even sunnier.
Beautiful